teens...Teens...TEens...TEEns...TEENs...TEENS #1

Teenagers are very special species of the homo sapiens. Thought they look like us and live among us but somehow they talk differently, have their own language, dress excessively, walk on air all the time and eat most of the time.

Let's start with how they talk and what they talk about. They slurrrr to make themselves sound ambiguous and important. Sometimes I stretched my ear so long that it would just snap off one day to try to hear what they have to say. But strangely, they have no problem in understanding one another, which amazes me.

They talk about music, fashion, internet games (mo xiang.dota...), friendster, mobile phones and most of all what happen to the opposite sex. Try deciphering their sms...sms stands for short message system, right? Theirs is superly short message system. Once a young person sent me a rather long sms but I used two days to try to understand all those short and frustratingly words formed with no vowels and drop off all those ending alphabets. Gosh! It was such a victory when I finally get to read it legibly.

As days go by, I realized that they too have their own language that it will take awhile to understand. The excuse is so "lame" and the hair style is so "shock"; that "dude" is so "cool" and that "gal" is so "hmmmm".

How about hairstyles? The guys keep long hairs and make it stands like the twin tower (when waxed) and the girls keep it short and "bob". My, my...it tests my sensibility to try to differeciate who is who from the back.

Music must be loud and stout; with lots of noise and mumbles fumbles (by this I mean rapping and God knows what else).

By now, you should identify yourself as one of them or you have one of them in your house. Besides all these outward identity, what makes me think is what is inside them. What are they thinking and where are they going from here?

We often complain about them being not responsible and not communicative. But it could be because we have not taken to effort to look inside their world. What is responsibility to you may not be responsibilities to them. For a parent, responsibility is "just do what you are told" for "this is good for you." But what is good for them from our point of view may not be true to them.

to be continued...